Monday, December 31, 2012

Thursday, December 27, 2012

My country was one that John Wayne loved. It’s gone now. The culture has changed.

One of the first films I recall is John Ford’s “The Searchers” made in 1956 starring John Wayne. The image of him standing in the doorway in the last scene burned into my young mind. This was a real man, who went his own way, imperfect; but always trying to do the right thing.

Maybe this is one reason we spend so much time in Utah. Wayne was in dozens films made there. Maybe we are searching for what we lost? We know it feels comforting to be where he was. It feels just as good to be with people that respect the Constitution – and Mormons certainly do that.

The 60’s changed a lot of people, myself included. The turmoil gave birth to a new generation of “progressives”. It also killed off the real men, first in Hollywood and then across the country. We no longer have the John Wayne’s, Robert Mitchum’s, Paul Neuman’s. Now what passes for “men” wear too big sweats with a ball cap on backwards.

Elizabeth Taylor Warner stated when testifying in favor of the special gold medal Congress struck for him: "He gave the whole world the image of what an American should be."

That was then. We are now in the Katie Couric era. A few dinosaurs surrounded by know nothing liberals.

"There's right and there's wrong," Duke said in The Alamo. "You gotta do one or the other. You do the one and you're living. You do the other and you may be walking around, but in reality you're dead."

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

The Second Amendment is divided into two parts: its prefatory clause and its operative clause. The former does not limit the latter grammatically, but rather announces a purpose. The Amendment could be rephrased, “Because a well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” Although this structure of the Second Amendment is unique in our Constitution, other legal documents of the founding era, particularly individual-rights provisions of state constitutions, commonly included a prefatory statement of purpose.

Scalia’s reasoning is fairly easy to understand. That is, simply saying why a right is necessary to protect before claiming that it is a right does not obviate the existence of the right once that reason ceases to be in effect.

Monday, December 17, 2012

Those in favor of gun rights feel that gun-control advocates are using the deranged actions of a few as a pretext to erode the right to bear arms. Because crimes committed with assault weapons are rare, they correctly note that such bans will have little or no impact on crime.

Gun-control advocates, meanwhile, are completely frustrated with Congress's unwillingness to strengthen gun laws, despite the mounting body count over the years. For them, an assault-weapons ban is a first step toward bringing some rationality to this country's gun policy.

The result is stalemate. This stalemate can be broken—but only if both sides retreat slightly instead of standing their ground.

In addition to guns, the common denominator in most of these mass shootings has been mental illness. Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech), Jared Lee Loughner (Tucson, Ariz.), James Eagen Holmes (in the Aurora, Colo. theater), and now Adam Lanza all had significant mental health problems. As the country turns its attention to overhauling its health-care delivery system, we must discuss improving access and delivery of mental health care to those who need it. As part of this conversation, we need to update federal firearm laws as they relate to persons with mental illness—laws that currently are primitive and rooted in stereotypes.

Federal law generally prohibits the possession or acquisition of a firearm by a person "who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or who has been committed to a mental institution." Putting aside the offensive label and legal jargon, in simple terms this means that a person is prohibited for life from possessing firearms if the person has ever been: involuntarily committed to a mental institution, or found by a court to be a danger to himself or others, found not guilty of a crime by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial, or unable to manage his own affairs. It does not matter whether the person currently has a mental illness.

Federal law is both under- and over-inclusive. It is under-inclusive because plenty of people with severe mental illnesses escape the ban on possessing firearms—provided, for example, they have managed not to be formally committed to a mental institution, or found by a court to be incompetent or insane. The ban is over-inclusive because many people recover from mental illness and lead healthy and productive lives. A single involuntary commitment for a severe eating disorder at age 20 will preclude a person from possessing a hunting rifle for the rest of his life.

Gun-rights advocates should support efforts to strengthen the prohibition on possessing firearms by those who have mental illness. Many people with severe mental illness are too dangerous to entrust with firearms—regardless of whether they have been formally labeled under the current law as ineligible.

Mr. Leider is a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law.

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Charles Hill on the decline of American power and the Westphalian world order

Yale Prof. Charles Hill writing Nov. 30 at The Caravan, a blog of the Hoover Institution:

The mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler prophesied that "We shall not get through this time without difficulty, for all the factors are prepared." Kepler was predicting the Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648 that would launch the modern international state system in which America and the nations of the world still operate.

What ominous factors caused Kepler to shiver? Disturbances, upheavals and conflicts. Merchants moaned about untrustworthy bankers. Diplomats strutted even as they wavered. The masses sullenly made deals they needed to survive when the gathering storm broke. Varieties of religious fervor caused many to prepare to be slain rather than submit to rule by others.

The 1648 settlement at Westphalia, though setbacks were many and vicious, enabled procedures fostering what eventually would be called "the international community," a term that curled many a lip in the midst of twentieth-century world wars. Those wars were attempts to overthrow the established world order. Those wars failed, but in recent decades have become seemingly interminable, and have required the stewards of world order to confront what George Shultz labels "asymmetrical" warfare in which professional standards have been turned into self-imposed liabilities by enemies who reject civilized international conduct.

No international order has proved immortal. Kepler today might note that the world order shaped by the war he predicted might now fail to survive to celebrate its 375th anniversary. As President Obama ponders his Second Inaugural Address, what Keplerian factors are now "prepared" for war?

The causes of war as discerned ever since Thucydides' time are three: wars of ideology, of fear, and of gain.

The ideology of Islamism has been on the rise for generations and now aims to expropriate the Arab Spring. The ambitions of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and Sunni fanaticism are transmogrifying into the kind of major religious war that the Treaty of Westphalia sought to forestall.

Thucydides traced the war that ruined ancient Greece to Sparta's fear that Athens' growing power was crossing the line where it would be impossible to contain. Israel faces that threat from Iran, as today's international structures for the maintenance of international security have failed to halt Iran's drive, propelled by religious ideology, to possess nuclear weapons. Israel, bereft of its traditional sense of American support, is making ready to act against Iran's menace to its existence. President Obama's priority must [be to] repair relations with Israel by visiting the Jewish state and convincing its leaders that the U.S. understands Israel's uniquely dangerous position.

And there now grows a deepening appetite for gain. America, perceived as eager to shed the burdens of world order in order to be "fundamentally transformed" through European-style social commitments, talks of engagement even when Iran's "diplomacy" is a form of protracted warfare. The enemies of world order translate the American election results into the lexicon of abdication, telling themselves that their time has come: there is a world to be gained.

Only America's return to world leadership can halt this deterioration. "Sequestration" will relegate the U.S. to a second rate power and must be reversed to enable American strength and diplomacy to be employed in tandem. Without this the prediction of a Kepler for today must be grim.